For the past couple of years I’ve been comparing where we currently are with Artificial Intelligence with where we were in 1994-1995 with the internet; alternately impressed and scared, dismissive and fascinated, eager to figure out how to use it to give us some kind of advantage we never thought
As humor goes, blooper reels are set at a pretty low bar. Hearing actors screw up and punctuate things with a tasty expletive gets old fast. So why am I posting a 14 minute reel of Warner Brothers contract actors blowing their lines from films made in 1939? Because it’s
Ronald Neame was a distinguished English cinematographer who worked with David Lean on their earliest films–‘Great Expectations’, ‘The Happy Breed’, ‘Oliver Twist’ etc. He then moved into directing and had a relatively good–if perhaps a bit spotty–run, directing a diverse set of films which included ‘The Poseidon Adventure’ (which he
Several years ago I produced and hosted a podcast featuring conversations between me and many legendary filmmakers. Among the guests were Mel Brooks, Andy Garcia, Peter Bogdanovich, Randal Kleiser, John Sayles, Mary Harron, John Avildsen…you get the idea. I stopped doing it because, frankly, I ran out of people I
At the peak of the Marx Brothers revival of the late 60s–mid 70s, an LP consisting of snippets of Marx Brothers routines was released and became my favorite record of all time…at least during the summer of 1974. The record is narrated by Garry Owens, an announcer who was a
Thomas ‘Fats’ Waller was born on May 21, 1904, thus making today his 122nd birthday. Waller was a singular figure in the music world. Nobody had a career remotely like his–he was a brilliant composer, superb pianist, innovative jazz organist, swinging singer, delightful comic personality and purveyor of infectious joy
As many of you cinema-geek sorts probably know, the original ending of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Dr. Strangelove’ was a pie fight that broke out in the war room. There are different reasons given for why it was cut–the above five minute doc claims the studio was nervous because Kennedy had just
Here’s a lovely clip from a 1970-ish Dick Cavett show featuring an interview with Orson Welles. Here, Welles trots out a few anecdotes that are popular in his repetoire but still delightful to hear from the great man himself. And trying to separate fact from fiction with Welles is always
I recently re-watched an excellent, not-too-well-known noir from 1955 called ‘The Big Combo’. It was directed by Joseph Lewis who most film buffs know as the man who directed the famous one-take bank robbery sequence in the 1949 noir ‘Gun Crazy’. In ‘Big Combo’, Lewis takes his limitations–it’s clearly a
Did you know that actor/director/restauranteur/sailor/guy who-co-produced ‘The Sting’ Tony Bill was a serious pilot and aviation history buff? A master pilot and aerobatics flyer, he’s owned and flown an envy-producing bunch of vintage hangar-candy among which are a 1946 Globe Swift, a 1935 Aeronica Chief, a 1929 Parks P-2A bi-plane,